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Sales Competencies - Are They Changing?

  
  
  
  

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

We established 21 Core Competencies for Selling about a decade ago.  They're still important but they might be evolving.  A salesperson's ability to use the internet may now be just as important as his ability to prospect, develop a relationship, qualify and close business.  Yesterday  I was speaking with Michael Benidt, author of  the Hidden Business Treasures Blog.  Michael believes that most of us don't really know how to use the internet to search for what we need.  He thinks that most of us associate finding prospects on the internet with affiliate marketing and AdWords. He's right.  Most salespeople don't have a clue about how to take advantage of the internet and we need to get better at it.  As it becomes more difficult to pick up a phone and get a prospect to answer our cold calls, we need to get better at getting prospects to find us.

On Thursday, I met with Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan of Hubspot.com.  They also author the Business 2.0 Blog.  They are developing tools to combine three previously unrelated activities on a web site.  Today, when somebody completes an online form to request more information, you get a lead consisting of contact information.  When somebody posts a comment to your blog you get an almost anonymous comment.  And when someone surfs your site they show up your site's overall statistics.  Hubspot's new tools will actually merge those three events so that when visitors submit a form, you'll also know about any comments they left on your blog as well as the specific pages they viewed while they were on your site.

Your salespeople definitely need to become more internet savvy.  There are dozens of strategies for finding prospects and learning more about your prospects.  Internet competence should be competency number 22.  Why not leave me a comment and let me know how your salespeople are taking advantage of this technology?

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Posted by Dave Kurlan on Sat, Dec 02, 2006 @ 08:49 AM

COMMENTS

Darmesh and Brian are with hubspot. Not blogspot.

Agreed on the point of the post. Spot on.

posted on Saturday, December 02, 2006 at 1:43 PM by peter caputa

hi there,

nice post.

But I don't think that Dharmesh works for Blogspot. I beleive both of them work for their startup in MA.

BR,
~A

posted on Saturday, December 02, 2006 at 8:24 PM by anjan bacchu

Apologies to Dharmesh and Brian - I got my spots confused but I used some bleach and corrected my mistake.

posted on Sunday, December 03, 2006 at 9:37 AM by

Dave,

HubSpot also tells you where the visitor originally came from (i.e. an ad, a Google search on ___, or through a link). This is useful as you can start correlating which "channels" are most highly correlated with sending the most highly "qualified" traffic (v. just traffic).

I think a very valuable tool for salespeople to use is RSS. If you are a major account manager, having using RSS to keep track of the latest news about a major account can be invaluable!

Brian.

posted on Monday, December 04, 2006 at 1:20 AM by Brian P Halligan

Dave,

HubSpot also tells you where the visitor originally came from (i.e. an ad, a Google search on ___, or through a link). This is useful as you can start correlating which "channels" are most highly correlated with sending the most highly "qualified" traffic (v. just traffic).

I think a very valuable tool for salespeople to use is RSS. If you are a major account manager, having using RSS to keep track of the latest news about a major account can be invaluable!

Brian.

posted on Monday, December 04, 2006 at 11:18 AM by Brian P Halligan

Brian,

Sorry for omitting that point. It's basically a fourth piece of information that Hubspot integrates into one. Nice.

posted on Tuesday, December 05, 2006 at 4:33 PM by Dave Kurlan

I strongly agree with the consideration of a 22nd core competency addressing utilization of technology. However, I think expanding this thinking beyond just Internet skills is required. In order to be successful in sales or sales management a comfort level with basic technology and the ability to apply it to support the sales or management process is critical. It is assumed most people have a baseline skill set that allows them to apply technology, using email, spreadsheets, CRM, other software etc. - unfortunately, it isn't always the case. If a person is not computer literate at a minimum level they will fall behind the curve in knowledge and productivity.

posted on Friday, December 22, 2006 at 3:27 PM by Vickie Brow

You're right Vickie. It should be technology based rather than internet based competency. Thanks for the clarificaiton.

posted on Saturday, December 23, 2006 at 8:11 AM by Dave Kurlan

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